Hello and welcome to this week's installment of Cue by Cue.
Today we're going to be listening to 8m1 The Mouse Robot.
This cue is 54 bars long and was orchestrated by Arthur Morton.
Continuing the trend of the last few weeks, this cue was rebalanced from 7m2 to 8m1, and presumably a "New" was added to signify the rebalance, although I don't have any definitive proof of this, hence I didn't add it to the title this week.
Unfortunately I only have a scan of the sheet from before the rebalance and not after, but we can be certain that it was rebalanced because 8m1 is its number on the final cue sheet, next week's cue is 8m2, and last week's was 7m2 already.
Here's the top of the first page of the non-rebalanced conductor score:
With that out of the way, let's listen to the cue together:
At 0:00 we get some playful music on woodwinds and plucked strings for the gag involving Chewbacca and the mouse droid, for which the cue is named.
Then at 0:12, the cue switches to low brass and percussion as the scene gets more serious, as the heroes have to sneak in plain sight through the busy hallways in order to get to the detention block.
At 0:29 as they approach the elevator, some backing strings come in as the percussion/brass changes up a little bit.
Then at 0:54, as they enter the elevator, we get a really interesting almost proto-Imperial March. The Imperial March theme of course wasn't written until The Empire Strikes Back, but this section of this cue always reminded me of fragments of it since it uses the same notes and has a similar rhythm. I can't help but wonder if Williams used this cue as an inspiration when writing it, or if it's just a coincidence.
At 1:06, while the proto-Imperial March continues, we get a quick reference to that playful mouse droid music from earlier in the cue as Ben sneaks around.
After that, a little more proto-Imperial March for the Vader shot, some more plucked strings for the shot of Ben, and then at 1:23 we get some of Luke's A theme as Han and Luke discuss things at the last minute in the elevator.
When the doors open and the heroes step out, there is an ascending orchestral swell, followed by some quiet woodwinds, a brass/percussion hit at 1:50, leading to one final swell at 1:56 for the start of the battle. Thus, the cue ends....
In the final film this cue is used in the scene it was meant to score, exactly as intended. In the Special Edition, it is additionally tracked earlier in the film during the extended "look sir, droids" scene, but we already talked about that when it was relevant.
This cue was recorded on March 9, 1977, the third day of the recording sessions. It was the third cue recorded that day. Four takes were recorded, numbered 64-67. According to the 1997 take log, the performance edit used just take 67.
This cue has been officially released on four different albums:
1) In 1977 on 20th Century Records' OST album
2) In 1993 on Arista Records' 4-CD Anthology box set
3) In 1997 on RCA Victor's 2-CD Special Edition set
4) In 2018 on Walt Disney Records' Remastered album (remastered OST rebuilt from scratch from the session masters)
More specifically, 8m1 The Mouse Robot can be heard:
From 0:00-2:01 of track 11 "Mouse Robot and Blasting Off" on the 1977/2018 albums
From 0:00-2:01 of disc 1 track 10 "Mouse Robot/Blasting Off" on the 1993 album
From 0:00-2:01 of disc 2 track 5 "Wookiee Prisoner/Detention Block Ambush" on the 1997 album.
The 1977 set is of course a remix and should be avoided. All sets have the clean opening but none of them have the clean ending. As far as I can tell all takes are the same. The 1997 set is brickwalled. For the video above I ended up using just the 2018 set because it had the cleanest ending, aka it took the longest to segue to the next cue.
That's all I have for today, thanks for reading! Feel free to leave any comments or questions.
Next week we'll be listening to 8m2 New More Rescue. See you then!
